Alessi

Frank gehry furniture is a single 54-year argument that any material — corrugated cardboard, ColorCore plastic laminate, bentwood maple, mirror-polished stainless steel, ColorCore again, then bronze and copper — can be made to behave like architecture. The argument opens in 1972 at the Easy Edges workshop on Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, and it closes, posthumously, on 14 May 2026 in the back room of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Larry Gagosian and the Gehry family have hung Fish on Fire — the last fish Frank Gehry executed in copper — beside a 2014 bear and a 2023 ColorCore crocodile under ten ink-and-watercolour drawings of fish in motion. Between those two dates sit the Wiggle Chair, the Fish Lamps, the Snake Lamps, the Knoll bentwood collection led by Cross Check, the Alessi Pito kettle, the 2006 Tiffany & Co. jewellery, the 2012 Gagosian fish revival, and the 2023 Louis Vuitton Capucines handbags. The 2026 show, organised six months after Gehry’s death and designed by his own studio, is also the prologue to “O Século de Gehry” at Fundação de Serralves in Porto, opening June 2026 and running until January 2027. ...

Loredana Parmesani has filled a 19th-century Pallanza villa with 130 Mendini objects arranged not as museum vitrines but as rooms — the Proust Armchair in one, the Straw Armchair in another, the 100% Make-Up vases lined up like household china, a jacket from the 1997 Furniture for Men series standing in the hallway clad in gold mosaic. The alessandro mendini retrospective at Villa Giulia, Verbania, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, runs from 16 May to 27 September 2026, was organised by the City of Verbania with the Alessandro Mendini Archive run by Mendini’s daughters Elisa and Fulvia, and stages the Studio Alchimia and Alessi lineages inside a domestic shell rather than the white cube. The exhibition is titled “Alessandro Mendini. Objects. Rooms as worlds.” The design of the show is by Alex Mocika. The thesis, by Parmesani’s own statement, is that the room — “a place of reflection, rest, quietness, and work, but also a place of turbulence” — is the unit of Mendini’s thinking, and that to put his work in vitrines is to mistake the work for its objects. ...